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he Dems dream of a vast new IRS is still alive even as Congressional Dems back off from Obama’s concept – cap and trade as a tax – in favor of a seemingly less onorous cap and trade as a grant concept. But that darn Congressional Budget Office just keeps on pointing out the obvious: No matter how its structured, cap and trade will be an economic Katrina on the American economy.

The CBO has issued a second letter opining on the Dem scheme, WashTimes reports:

Congress’ chief scorekeeper says the global warming bill moving through Congress will either be scored as a major tax increase or a massive expansion of the federal government – and either one could give opponents substantial ammunition to complicate Democrats’ efforts to pass a bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a letter sent last week to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, said Democrats’ approach of creating allowances for emitting greenhouse gases requires developing from scratch a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. …

The six-page CBO letter also listed repeated examples of situations in which, for purposes of the federal budget, it will assume that the cap-and-trade approaches will dampen businesses’ income, meaning less revenue to the federal government.

The Dem response?  Well, they’re trying to work with CBO.  They figure that maybe if they threaten the CBO budget or start making personal attacks on its staff, they’ll be able to get the watchdogs to change a couple assumptions and come out with a rosier report. In other words, they’re not looking at the bill, seeing it for what it is and deciding to wait until the economy is back on its feet to cut its legs out from under it.  Instead, they remain intent on kicking the economy while its down and want to get fudged numbers to excuse their action.

Meanwhile, the environmental lobbying machine is busy discounting the CBO:

Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center, said the CBO will still have to issue a final score on the bill when it passes the committee, and NRDC hopes the letter is not the last word.

“What they have left out of their analysis is the benefit to consumers of energy efficiency – that actually lowers their bills. I don’t see anywhere in this long set of examples this accounts for that,” Mr. Lashof said.

That’s because the CBO hasn’t yet come up with the metrics to measure pipe dreams and fantasies.  There is no energy efficient replacement immediately available that would allow us to avoid the immediate impacts of cap and trade. As one commenter to the WashTimes story sarcastically put the Dem view of things,

The CBO is full of partisan hacks who want to do nothing more than destroy this once great nation. But, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center is a straight down the middle lovable group who would never do anything that might tear apart the very foundations of our economy.

The new bill gives the GOP and blue dog Dems some hope that cap and trade might be the first Obama policy initiative to fall flat on its face.  That certainly must be the goal, both to protect the economy from Warmie lunacy and to signal an end to the devastating run Obama’s enjoyed.

Do your part. Write your member of Congress and demand they tell you before they vote how the bill will impact your power bill and the price at the pump.  Keep asking; hold them to it.

Art: The Talk of the Times 

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he Center for Biological Depravity Diversity was its hyperbolic self yesterday in an email sent to its supporters (and watchers, like me):

[Interior Sec. Ken] Salazar confirmed our worst fears for his tenure as Secretary of the Interior — he announced that he will adopt Bush’s polar bear extinction plan …

You have to hand it to the folks at the CBD; they know how to gin up the language, turning a simple rule that allows the careful, ongoing use of existing oil production facilities as “Bush’s polar bear extinction plan.” Of course, it’s easier to turn a phrase like that when you don’t need to worry about facts, ethics or honesty like the rest of us.

Leaving CBD’s hyperbole aside, here’s what Salazar did, from DOI’s news release:

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced today that he will retain a special rule [a "4(d) rule"] issued in December for protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, but will closely monitor the implementation of the rule to determine if additional measures are necessary to conserve and recover the polar bear and its habitat. …

Section 4(d) of the ESA allows the Fish and Wildlife Service to tailor regulatory prohibitions for threatened species as deemed necessary and advisable to provide for the conservation of the species. Hence, the special rule is referred to as a 4(d) rule. …

The rule also states that incidental take of polar bears resulting from activities outside the bear’s range, such as emission of greenhouse gases, will not be prohibited under the ESA.

“Incidental take” means harming, harrassing or killing, when done incidental to other legal activities; stated less bureaucratically, it means “not deliberate.” The polar bear is classified as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, so if you go out and just shoot one for sport, you’re in big trouble. But with Salazar’s action yesterday, it remains legal to go about the legal activities of maintaining oil production facilities and exploring for oil on oil lease land, even if by some unprovable nexus, your activities cause a chunk of ice to melt, a polar bear to tumble into the sea, somehow forget how to swim, and drown.

The greens pushed hard to get the polar bear listed as endangered, because the 4(d) rule can only be applied to threatened species, not endangered ones.  Bush was justified in not listing the polar bear at all – their populations are stable, even growing in some regions, and there’s no proof that polar icemelt is permanent; indeed, last winter’s ice build-up was record-breaking.  But in one of his weaker moves, Bush gave in and took the middle ground, listing it as threatened and writing the 4(d) to protect energy production and other activities.

I’ve lived through this myself.  In the early 1990s, Hugh Hewitt and I orchestrated the campaign to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed under Cailfornia’s ESA, then eked out a “threatened” listing from the incoming Clinton administration, dodging the “endangered” bullet.  As a result, thousands of new homes and commercial/industrial facilities were built that otherwise would have been stopped dead by the less flexible endangered listing.

And the gnatcatcher, God bless it, is thriving.

The same will certainly be true of the polar bear, which has survived previous warming spells.  I’m not sure if the same can be said now of Obama’s cap and trade tax movement, which is already unpopular in Congress.  If you doubt the signficance of the hurdles Obama’s facing with this madcap scheme, just ask the free market: The price of CO2 credits has dropped dramatically.

Now Obama must defend the urgency of imposing cap and trade on a crippled, job-shedding economy even while admitting through Salazar’s action that things really aren’t all that urgent.  If global warming were the immediate threat the hysterics Obama campaigned to say it is, Salazar would have suspended the 4(d) rule at a minimum and could have even re-opened the process to go for an endangered listing.

That  he didn’t is solid evidence that the Obama administration is watching gas prices, which are beginning to creep up again.  They know that a repeat of last year’s run-up in gas costs will spell doom to cap and trade, and cost any politician who’s anti-drilling points in the polls.  So to keep his numbers up and the changes of cap and trade alive, Obama approved the continuation of the 4(d) in spite of howling opposition from the environmentalists.

That he could make so politic a trade at the expense of the polar bear (at least that’s how the Greenies put it) can only be read as proof that Obama doesn’t view global warming and cap and trade to be issues as important as his own popularity.  Smart opponents of cap and trade just got some powerful new ammunition, and I hope they’re loading their legislative and rhetorical weapons as I write.

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nce upon a time, I bought the environmentalist diatribe against nuclear power.  Once upon a time, I was that kind of fool. I’ve learned a lot since then, and while I can’t verify everything in the email below, it does show just how extensive the Greenie misinformation campaign has been.  The email is from DuPree Moore and ran originally in Greenie Watch.

From 1968 to 1973, I was an engineering officer aboard U. S. nuclear submarines. The chief engineer would routinely sneak back into the engineering spaces and trip some piece of equipment off the line. These were not computer simulations. The equipment really would be in an emergency condition. We would be sitting in the reactor control room, and suddenly alarms would go off. We would have to figure out what had happened, and recover from it. The equipment is designed to survive such accidents. After many decades of operation under those conditions, the Navy has had zero deaths from nuclear power. You are more likely to drown in your bathtub than to die from operating a nuclear reactor.

A coal-fired electric power generating plant uses 120 railroad cars full of coal every day. A nuclear plant uses one semi truckload of nuclear fuel rods every few years. All the spent fuel from every nuclear reactor in the United States could be stored on one football field, a pile nine feet tall. Recycle it as the French do, and the pile shrinks to three inches. In 500 years it will be less toxic than coal ash.

It is preposterous to talk about nuclear waste remaining toxic for tens of thousands of years. It is preposterous to talk about tens of thousands of deaths from a nuclear accident. Those analyses are based upon a laughable error. If one person eats 200 aspirin, he will die. These people figure that if 200 people eat one aspirin each, there will be one death. If two million people are exposed to a dose rate of one aspirin per person, there will be 20,000 deaths. In fact one aspirin is beneficial, and low levels of radiation are beneficial. Geographical areas with higher background radiation have lower levels of cancer.

Chernobyl proved just how safe nuclear power is. There was no containment vessel. All radiation was released to the environment. There were less than 200 deaths, all among on-site personnel. An exhaustive international inquiry under the UN found no documented health damage beyond the immediate vicinity (except for a slight increase in thyroid cancer among children, which can be completely prevented by taking inexpensive iodine supplements in the event of a nuclear accident). The area around Chernobyl has been declared a radioactive dead zone at radiation levels about the same as downtown Warsaw, Poland, and five times lower than Grand Central Station in New York City. Plants and animals flourish in the region, showing no ill effects. It is stark raving mad.

Three-Mile Island nuclear accident caused zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation release to the environment. And it was not a close call. It might have been a close call from having much more extensive equipment damage, but the worst possible accident would still have been kept entirely within the containment vessel. There would have been zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation released to the environment. If terrorists flew an airplane into a nuclear reactor, it would not rupture the containment vessel.

During the 1970′s there was an anti-nuclear campaign, similar to the global warming campaign today. It was based on grossly inaccurate information, but it prevailed politically to impose onerous regulations which killed nuclear power as a source of electricity. I have seen a comparison of two nuclear power plants in the United States which began construction at about the same time. One finished up before the new regulations went into effect. It came in on budget, and generates to this day the cheapest, safest, and cleanest electricity on this planet. The second reactor ran afoul of the new regulations. It ran into massive cost overruns, and never was completed.

Lawrence Solomon was part of the anti-nuclear campaign during the 1970′s. Today he has done some excellent research disproving the global warming theory, especially disproving the assertions of a scientific consensus about it; but to this day he is wrong about nuclear power. To this day he says, “Nuclear reactors run flat-out 24/7″, and cannot be adjusted to match power demand. He is simply wrong. The reactor remains critical 24/7, but a reactor can be critical at zero power. The power output automatically matches the power demand. I have personally operated nuclear reactors, and I know for a fact what I am talking about. That is the kind of misinformation which has destroyed nuclear power, the greatest scientific advance in the history of the world.

And that’s the way it is … not the way Greenpeace and others say it is.

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esterday, a group of unelected know-it-all bureaucrats decided it’s not enough that California residents alread are crushed under the second-highest tax burden in the nation, they will impose a massive new tax so they might tip at global warming windmills and force us into their choices for our cars.

The LA Times happily established the motivation for this newest attack on Californians’ wallets:

California took aim Thursday at the oil industry and its impact on global warming, adopting the world’s first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.

Oil built this economy; oil fueled the state; oil made fortunes that created universities and endowed charities, but oil is the bogeyman of the Warmies and must be killed at all cost because they think tiny increases in a negligible atmospheric gas are going to kill us all. So CARB, the California Air Resources Board, voted 9 to 1 to pass a complex new rule that will drive up the cost of gasoline and, they hope, penalize hapless car drivers into reducing their fuel consumption by a quarter in the next decade.

And, of course, they hope this false economy will finally create huge consumer demand for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and, as the LAT hopefully put it, “jump-start a host of futuristic biofuels” from algae, woodchips and other stuff that’s been around forever and has yet to produce energy anywhere near as efficiently as good ol’ God-given crude.

Still, CARB, which calls itself “ARB” in a bold move to reduce electron waste, said:

“The new standard means we can begin to break our century-old dependence on petroleum and provide California with greater energy security” said ARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols. “The drive to force the market toward greater use of alternative fuels will be a boon to the state’s economy and public health – it reduces air pollution, creates new jobs and continues California’s leadership in the fight against global warming.”

Nichols is a long-time California greenie, and one of its most powerful. She started the Los Angeles office of the nation’s richest, most powerful environmental law firm, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and started her many stints on CARB in 1974, when Jerry Brown appointed her its chair. She also was an Assistant Sec at EPA under Clinton. In other words, she’s been forcing environmentalism onto the public for 25 years, and doing quite well at it. The CARB release continues:

According to ARB analyses, to produce the more than 1.5 billion gallons of biofuels needed, over 25 new biofuel facilities will have to be built and will create more than 3,000 new jobs, mostly in the state’s rural areas. Production of fuels within the state will also keep consumer dollars local by reducing the need to make fuel purchases from beyond its borders.

CARB doesn’t bother to tell us how many perfectly good jobs in oil will be displaced by this Quixotic scheme, nor does it deal with the 8,000 pound gorilla in this little matter: water. Many of the rural areas they hope to bring these jobs to already have unemployment rates over 40 percent because water deliveries have been cut back so much farmers can’t grow crops. Where does Nichols expect to find the water to grow the biofuel stock, and where, oh where, does she think she’s going to find the hundreds of gallons of water needed to process each gallon of biofuel?

But they plow on. Forcing the cost of transportation up so they can force us into the cars they want us to drive, or better yet, onto the buses they don’t ride in themselves.

This state is going to Hades in hyperdrive. I’d move, but the LAT tells me 35 states are watching CARB’s action with gleeful anticipation, hoping to follow in California’s path at their earliest convenience. Watch out! California may be coming to a neighborhood near you soon.

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eing fortunate residents of Earth, we do have quite a lot to celebrate today … and I do wish Earth Day were a celebration instead of a dreadful day full of dire recitations of the evil man, particularly capitalist man, does to the planet and political grandstanding about saving the earth. As if the Earth could be saved by new-comer pipsqueaks like us … and as if the Earth needed saving in the first place.

But grandstand they will.  In his long-awaited Earth Day proclamation, Obama called for us to protect the nation’s natural resources like, you know, oil, because it “not only fulfills a sacred obligation to our children and grandchildren, but also provides an opportunity to stimulate economic growth.”  He apparently has missed the lesson on how much economic growth oil has stimulated.

Similarly, the eco-loons at Al’s multi-million dollar Repower America.org, made their “green equals jobs” pitch via an email:

We’ve been running ads and talking to people across the country to raise awareness about the carbon pollution loophole. And by adopting our call, President Obama has demonstrated that he understands that a cap on carbon pollution will lead to rapid growth in clean energy investment and create millions of jobs. With unemployment at 8.5%, we know there is no time to waste.

But without swift action from Congress, these jobs will be allowed to go elsewhere, as other nations continue to outpace us on progress towards a clean energy economy.

Not mentioned in this cheery little Earth Day tome is the inconvenient truth that for every new job created by new, high-priced alternative energy, there are many more jobs taken away. Start with the jobs of people who work exploring for oil, extracting oil, refining oil, delivering oil, marketing oil, and figuring out how many billions of dollars in taxes are due the government for those sales of oil. Then add the millions of jobs that will be lost as businesses fold due to rising energy prices brought on by alternative technologies that are not yet ready for prime time.  And the jobs that will be lost because lost oil tax revenues plus billion-dollar alternative energy incentives inescapably will result in crushingly higher taxes on everyone (expect Obama’s favorite class, the under-achieving).

It will be a net loss in jobs, believe me. Slapping together solar panels will not replace those jobs, nor will building windmills off the Hyannis Port coast … nor will, even, defending those windmills against lawsuits brought by the Kennedys.

So celebrate Earth Day as it should be celebrated: Thank God for giving us such a wonderful place to live, and commit to being a better steward of the resources He gave us … which means fighting deep green lunacy vigorously, and adopting light green practices like conservation religiously.

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ext Thursday, Interior Sec. Salazar will be in San Francisco on the final stop of his four-city tour to solicit comment on offshore oil leases. We know where Obama stands on the matter – if offshore drilling can be made completely safe, he doesn’t oppose it unless it would further the imminent destruction of the planet by global warming, which of course he figures it does.

Salazar’s tour comes as the fed agency that administers the offshore oil and natural gas leasing program, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), considers the size, timing, and location of the areas to be considered for federal leasing. MMS bases its recommendations in part on the public comments, and the enviros are pulling out the stops. Here’s a bit of an email I got from Endangered (yawn) Earth:

Offshore drilling has the potential to have a negative impact on species already in peril.

The Endangered Species Coalition is encouraging our members and activists to attend the hearing and testify on behalf of threatened and endangered species. …

Secretary Salazar will be at these hearings. We understand it is short notice but if at all possible please attend …. Your message can be simple:

“Offshore drilling poses risks to a number of endangered species. But these risks cannot be properly addressed while the Bush Administration’s Consultation rules and polar bear exemptions remain in place. Hundreds of thousands of public comments were received opposing the changes but were ignored by the last administration, please listen to these comments and overturn these rules. I urge you to act quickly and use the opportunity given to you by the U.S. Congress and President Obama to restore protection.” …

Also, in a show of solidarity we are asking people to wear white for the Polar Bear!

Dressing in white.  How cute.

If you remember the polar bear fiasco, the Bush admin approved listing the bear as threatened even though its populations are growing and the threat to the polar icecap was unproved (and since shown to be unfounded, as the winter freeze-up this year was record-breaking.) But Bush added some rules that allow oil exploration, so the enviros are using the Salazar hearings, which are about offshore oil, not Alaska oil, to protest extraction of any hydrocarbons anywhere, for whatever reason.

What a good idea that is! According to the feds, the U.S. has enough oil and natural gas to fuel more than 65 million cars for 60 years and enough natural gas to heat 60 million homes for 160 years. In fact, the U.S. government estimates that there are 30 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil on federal lands currently closed to development. So what better idea can we come up with than leaving all of it unexploited?

Although a five-year plan approving increased offshore drilling was released in January, Salazar has directed Interior Department scientists to produce new reports and has extended the public comment period to September, to allow for this little comment-fest. He’s hoping that comments will give the admin cover as it works to deprive us of the easiest route to greater energy independence – which happens to be exactly the route a large majority of Americans endorse. How loony is that?

Fortunately, you can comment without having to go to San Francisco and risk confrontation with gays who are angry you exist and enviros dressed in white in solidarity with polar bears who would just as soon put them out of existence because they’re probably pretty tasty.

Just go to Energy Tomorrow’s Take Action on Access page and spend about three seconds sending out your letter (click the email icon)  or your tweet, Facebook post, YouTube clip or whatever, they’re all there,  encouraging MMS and Congress to allow greater access to domestic energy reserves. And please link to and forward this post – let’s get some letters generated!

And if you want to dress in black in solidarity with crude, that’s OK, too.

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t’s as if the economy were robust, spewing out money to burn.  It’s like everyone agreed there was an imminent threat of global environmental collapse because of human activity.  It’s as if everyone was eagerly awaiting higher costs to everything.

It’s as if the Dems didn’t have a brain in their heads:

House Democratic leaders unveiled a sweeping plan to fight climate change and boost renewable energy this morning, including mandates for renewable electricity nationwide and a market-based system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan … is a “discussion draft” authored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D- Beverly Hills), the committee chairman, and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. Among the bill’s provisions:

* A nationwide mandate for renewable energy — such as wind, solar and biomass — in electric power generation, starting at 6% in 2012 and rising to 25% by 2025.

Shall we discuss the cost of developing that infrastructure out of thin air?  Or the plausibility of the entire concept?  Or the need, considering our coal, oil and natural gas reserves, our hydroelectric capabilities and potential, a nuclear industry just waiting to re-emerge?  (All quotes from the LA Times, BTW.)

* A “cap-and-trade” program to restrict greenhouse gas emissions by requiring utilities and other emitters to hold “allowances” for the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere. The level of allowances would shrink annually to reduce carbon emissions to 3% below 2005 levels by 2012, to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

Shall we discuss this a bit?  I did with the American Petroleum Institute earlier today, and here’s what the good folks there told me:

API hasn’t taken a position on the topic of cap-and-trade per se, but we have been very outspoken about the potential costs of the cap-and-trade proposal in the administration’s 2010 budget.

Based on the administration’s initial estimate, it appeared the proposal would generate $646 billion in revenues.  Our calculations indicate that about 60% of that would come from oil and natural gas, which equates to about $400 billion. Later administration estimates indicated that the revenues could be three times the $646 billion figure, so it appears the burden on this industry – and on consumers – could be much higher than originally anticipated.

You’d think that before madcap schemes are introduced for discussion, someone somewhere might have a handle on how much destruction the proposal will cause family budgets across America.  But really – $646 billion or three times that amount; do we really need either?

* A national standard, akin to California’s, limiting carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and a new low-carbon fuel standard to further support bio-fuels and low-emission alternatives to gasoline.

Can we discuss this?  Is this really what the automobile industry needs right now?  Perhaps it would be better to get them back on their feet again before cutting them off at the ankles.

Remember, no alternative technologies are ready for market without cap and trade to penalize existing technologies.  They cannot produce enough energy, and they cannot produce it cheaply enough. Cap and trade is just a fancy name for government tromping all over the free market in the name of “saving the planet.”

The planet doesn’t need saving.  The economy does.  And the free market’s on life support.

P.S.: The LA Times report quoted several environmentalist, most of whom were positively giddy about the day’s development.  I sent the reporter this email:

Just read your story and was amazed to find that apparently there wasn’t a single source from industry anywhere for you to get a quote from. Really? Just representatives of environmental groups?

Guess what?  No response.

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all Street was down today but eked out its first positive week in quite some time – but don’t look for a continuation Monday as, first, the Congressional Budget Office said today Obamarx’s budget will produce losses $2.3 TRILLION worse than the White House predicts ($9.3 trillion worth from 2010-2019) and second, that the Obamarxists say damn the torpedoed economy, they’re not going to cut a single program.

Included in the programs they’re not about to cut is their greenhouse gas cap and trade program, which received endorsement of a Discovery Channel feature on alternative energy Incredible Wife and I watched this week.  With every single new technology they showed, someone looked earnestly into the camera and said:

“We need carbon emission cap and trade for this to work.  Without that financial incentive, this technology is just an overpriced waste of time and money.”

Or something to that effect.  Translation:  Unless the fuels you use get crazy expensive, you’d never be crazy enough to use the fuels the Greenies want you to use.  The price tag of this little incentive program for clean energy?

President Obama’s climate plan could cost industry close to $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House’s initial estimate of the so-called “cap-and-trade” legislation, according to Senate staffers who were briefed by the White House.

A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president’s climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26.

“We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that’s a big number,’” said a top Republican staffer who attended the meeting along with between 50 and 60 other Democratic and Republican congressional aides. (WashTimes)

How reassuring do you find it that they had no clue what the program was going to cost?  But so what? Who cares? Obamarx says larger deficits and larger than expected costs for his programs mean nothing to him.

“What we will not cut are investments that will lead to real growth and prosperity over the long term. That’s why our budget … enhances America’s competitiveness by reducing our dependence on foreign oil and building a clean energy economy.”

Enhances competitiveness by making everything we make, everything we grow, more expensive?  Please explain – without a teleprompter – how that works.

But no matter. Whether we want to do it or not, we have to do it to save the fragile planet, which without alternative energy and an end to greenhouse gas over-emitting, will soon be awash in seawater from rising oceans.  Riiiiight …

How many times have you seen the word “collapse” used lately to describe what could unfold should human-caused global warming, and more particularly warming seas, erode the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? (One metric: A Google search for “West Antarctic Ice Sheet” and “collapse” gets 29,800 hits.)

The word is used again in the headline on one of two new papers in the journal Nature focusing on past comings and goings of that huge expanse of ice. But this paper, by David Pollard at Penn State and Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, provides an estimated time frame for the loss of ice that its authors say should be of some comfort. (If the sheet melted entirely, sea levels worldwide would rise more than 15 feet.)

Dr. Pollard and Dr. DeConto ran a five-million-year computer simulation of the ice sheet’s comings and goings, using data on past actual climate and ocean conditions gleaned from seabed samples (the subject of the other paper) to validate the resulting patterns.

The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process — at its fastest — takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn’t go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said …. (NYT)

That’s less than a quarter inch a year – the same amount the ocean’s been rising for the last 100,000 20,000 years or so [corrected], more than 19,800 years before human involvement (what a joke!) in our climate.  And in case you missed that attribution, folks, it says NYT, as in the New York Times – hardly a bastion of anti-Warmie journalism.

Yet Obamarx marches on with his scheme of cap and trade, despite the damage it will do to an economy that is far more stretched and fragile than he admits, despite the fact that there is no immediate threat from global warming. There’s a word for that. Demagoguery.

We may have a horrible government, but we’ve got a beautiful language.

Hat-tip: Jim. Art: Minnesotans for Global Warming

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resident Obama’s kowtow to the green lobby – tens of billions of dollars in green tech incentives and tens of billions of dollars in old energy penalties – was on the ballot in LA yesterday. That’s LA, as in Hollyweird and Dem strongholds, as in Ed Begley and abounding Greenie fanatics.

Measure B would give LA’s Dept. of Water & Power authority to install 400 megawatts-worth of solar power on rooftops throughout the city, an action which curiously would increase, not decrease, the cost of power by two or three percent. It was backed by the mayor, the labor unions, the environmentalists and (natch) the LA Times, who all said it would help clean the air by speeding the demise of coal fired power plants. High-fives all around!

Well, the morning after has hit and Measure B is losing in a squeaker, 50.3% to 49.7%. It might still win, but even if it does, voters in LA have sent a couple signals by their vote.

First, they are not in a spending mood. Another two or three percent on their utility bills does not make them happy. Imagine what they’ll think when they hear about the impact Obama’s carbon cap and trade will have on all their bills.

And second, they don’t like dirty green. Opponents to B successfully positioned the vote as all about power – political power – that was rushed onto the ballot without due process. They pointed out that DWP is free to install solar without a vote of the people, so the ballot measure was a way for the city council and its union buddies to lock organized labor into all future municipal energy projects.

If LA can’t pass (or can just barely pass) a measure like this, why should the rest of America agree to the costly green energy measures crammed into Obama’s stimulus bill, which was crammed through Congress so quickly no one had time to read it?

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s the pres-elect readies his trillion-dollar tax us to death incentive program with all its government inducements to the greening-up of America, perhaps a member or two of his brain trust should read this:

Home builders slapped on solar panels and added other ecofriendly enhancements as energy prices soared last year, hoping greener homes would lure reluctant buyers.

But since July, the cost of oil has plunged from $147 a barrel to about $36, while home prices continued to fall. Together, these headwinds have stalled low-energy housing developments around the country.

“The program doesn’t necessarily pencil out at the moment,” said Scott Kramer, a forward planner for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Meritage Homes Corp., which builds homes in Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, and Florida.

“People don’t seem to be willing to pay for it.”

In 2007, Meritage packed $20,000 worth of solar panels, high performance insulation, low-leakage air ducts, and other systems in its first green community in Vacaville, Calif. The “Encore” homes promised to slash electric bills up to half, and buyers snapped them up even though Meritage offered them at a higher price than competitors.

Sales figures in July showed the Encore development sold 1.55 homes per week, compared with 0.88 per week for similar homes in the same city, Kramer said.

But that advantage disappeared in the second half of the year. Meritage and its closest competitor both sold about one home every two weeks according to sales data for November, and Meritage slashed prices that month. Though Meritage continues to build Encore homes in Vacaville, it’s reevaluating whether to move forward with plans to start new green communities.

UBS analyst David Goldberg said most major builders will continue to invest in green developments. But they’ll likely need to find cheaper ways of doing it. “If it cost more to put solar panels on there, are you still exploring it? I’d say, maybe not,” Goldberg said. (Boston Globe)

Being green and stopping global warming (heh!) are luxuries and this is not a luxuriant time.  People are making tough, pragmatic choices like “the Bahamas or dinner and a movie … let’s do dinner and a movie.”  It’s not a time for $20,000 in solar panels if the payoff is five years away … and it’s not the time for trillion dollar boondoggles.

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